PerforceNB User Guide

This is under hard development, so please be patient

Contents

1 PerforceNB User Guide

1.1 Install/Uninstall

1.1.1 Install
1.1.2 Uninstall

1.2 Configure the plugin

1.2.1 Perforce connections
1.2.2 Perforce plugin general options
1.2.3 Perforce ignore files feature

Install/Uninstall

Install

The PerforceNB plugin can be installed from nbm files. Usually, the nbm file is compressed into an zip archive, labeled according to the implemented revision number, and made available for download on this site and on the NetBeans official plugin page.

The installation process is quite simple: download and unzip the compressed file. Open NetBeans IDE and fire Tools -> Plugins menu. From the opened dialog box, select Downloaded tab. In the Downloaded tab action the button Add plugins.. to select the nbm plugin file and after selection, action the button Install and restart IDE.

Uninstall

Usual procedure to uninstall a plugin from NetBeans. From global menu Tools -> Plugins, select Installed tab. Find the PerforceNB plugin and action Uninstall button to uninstall the plugin.

I hope you will try that only for an upgrade, thought there is a better way to upgrade. Use panel Updates if your new version of the downloaded plugin is decompressed over the old plugin version.

Configure the plugin

Perforce connections

A client can connect to a Perforce server through a connection. To manage perforce connections a user must use the preferences dialog box. Action the menu Tools -> Options. Select Miscellaneous / Versioning tab, and select Perforce from the version control system list, presented in the left side of the dialog box.

You can add / edit / delete perforce connections from here. The fields required to create a perforce connection are presented in the picture below.

Hints:

After entering the port field value (address and port of the perforce server), you can select the user from perforce users using ... button.
After selecting / introducing a user value you can select a client for the user on the perforce server.
After you complete all the field values, the id for the connection can be generated using button Generate Id

Perforce plugin general options

This panel hold for now only two options:

Use interceptor for automated actions.

If enabled all actions like edit, add, delete files will fire the perforce plugin interceptor. The interceptor will execute the proper perforce command silently. As a sample: if a file is edited, the file will be automatically checked out. If a file is deleted from disk, than the mark as delete action will be fired by perforce plugin. If this option is disabled, that all these actions must be executed explicitly.

Enable debug log

This option is used on development. It print at perforce output window the messages with debug log level. In normal usage, this option must be unselected.

Perforce ignore files feature

The ignore file management feature is implemented by perforce plugin.

If a file is ignored, that, the file will be protected from perforce operations, even if the file/folder resides unde perforce client root folder. Ignored files are marked with a special color (light grey) and the name will be decorated with 'ignored' label.

Ignored files can be enabled by creating ignore rules. There are three types of ignore rules available:

project rules - the name patter of the ignored files starts from project root and the ignore rules applies to all opened projects
absolute path rule - as it's name states, the specified ignored file/folder rule use an absolute path. It applies only to the specified file/folder.
mask rule - uses '*' as a place holder and matches all the file names with the specified rule. Is applied on all available files/folder from all projects.

Note: If a rule matches a folder, than all the files and folder included in the matched folder will become ignored.

In the picture below there are given three specified rules, two project rules and one mask rule.